Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to get a cross platform
.NET IDE. Homer's Odyssey described one man's effort to
achieve such a thing. And it was not until today, September
9th of 2009 that the world can test out such a tool.

With this release MonoDevelop leaves its cozy Linux nest
and embarks on a wild adventure into the hearth of MacOS and
Windows. The MonoDevelop team made this one of their major
goals for this release: to turn our loved IDE into a cross
platform IDE.

We are not only bringing MonoDevelop to OSX and Windows as
a plain GUI port, but we are also providing installers, deep
operating system integration and support for native debugging
on each platform.

MonoDevelop on MacOS X

In addition to becoming a cross platform IDE, there are
many new features in MonoDevelop.

For instance, MonoDevelop can be used to develop ASP.NET
MVC applications on OSX and Linux and Silverlight applications
on OSX and Linux.

Debugger

MonoDevelop now
has integrated
debugger support. Not only it is able to debug Mono
applications, it also can work as a frontend to GDB to debug
native applications.

In addition, on Linux it is possible to debug ASP.NET
pages.

New Add-ins

New exciting add-ins: ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and iPhone
(for use with MonoTouch).

Policies

A common problem that we face as open source developers is
that not every project uses the same coding style. Different
teams use different coding conventions. MonoDevelop now
supports policies to describe how files should be edited and
what defaults should be used in each:

Editor Improvements

My favorite new feature is Dynamic Abbrev (Alt-/) a feature
that we brought from Emacs and that fills me with joy. That
being said, for the non-Emacs lovers there are plenty of
features that you asked for, and that we implemented:

VI mode for those users hooked up on VI commands,
they can now use those within MonoDevelop.

Another pretty cool feature is the code generation support
that is triggered with Alt-Insert. When you press Alt-insert
it will popup a context sensitive dialog box that offers a few
options of code that could be generated at this point:
ToString methods, Equals/GetHashCode methods all based on
existing fields and properties.

Why go Cross Platform?

Going cross platform means that developers will have the
same tool across all of the operating systems they use:
Windows, Mac and Linux.

.NET developers that have been enchanted by OSX will be
able to continue developing software with their favorite
programming languages while enjoying OSX and will be able to
go back and forth between Windows, OSX and Linux as needed.
This also means that they can work with developers in other
platforms, regardless of the personal choices of other team
members.

As many of you know, the number of contributors to a
project is linked to the number of users of that project. By
expanding our market presence from Linux, we expect to
get contributions, fixes, improvements, bug reports, code and
add-ins from developers in other platforms.

We intend to make MonoDevelop the Eclipse of the .NET
community. Just like Eclipse became the foundation for Java
development, we hope that MonoDevelop will become the
foundation for .NET development, and hopefully for much more
than that.

A multi-system IDE

We are not religious when it comes to supporting other
programming languages [1]. We want to embrace not only
.NET-based projects like Gtk#, Silverlight, ASP.NET, Boo, C#,
F#, Visual Basic and Windows.Forms. We are also embracing
other developer platforms like Python, C/C++, Vala, and we
want to expand our presence to work with the Flash, PHP, Ruby,
Rails, Flex and any other communities that need a cross
platform IDE.

[1] we are just religious about the fact that C# is a
better programming language to build an IDE than Java is.

Thanks!

This release could not have been possible without the
endless nights and the collaborations of
our contributors
and all of the end users that reported bugs and gave us
feedback.